Thursday, August 06, 2020

Remembering Hiroshima

A version of the post below also appears on The Conservative Woman today:
https://conservativewoman.co.uk/8-14am-august-16-1945-the-bomb-that-changed-the-world/
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Father John A. Simes was starting his day at Hiroshima when it happened, at about quarter past eight on 6 August 1945 http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hiroshima/Hiroshima_Siemes.shtml . He was up in the hills with the Jesuit Mission that had relocated there after the gigantic fire-bombing of Tokyo in March by hundreds of American planes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo#Operation_Meetinghouse . This time, incredibly, to inflict similar damage only needed a single bomb, a weapon so different that it took Father Simes some time to piece together what had happened. Conventional air raids in World War Two – yet how is napalming civilians conventional? – claimed perhaps twice as many lives in Japan as Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s victims combined; but ever since that day 75 years ago, warfare’s potential has been on a new, even ghastlier level.
The British people’s reaction to the radio news, first relayed on the Home Service at 6 p.m., was not unmixed rejoicing, according to sources quoted by David Kynaston in his ‘Austerity Britain’ (pp. 82-86). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Austerity-Britain-1945-1951-Tales-Jerusalem/dp/0747599238 The nine o’clock edition gave more details of the Bomb and its effects – still hard to discern through the ‘pall of smoke and dust’ - on what had been a Japanese ‘army base’ at six but three hours later was ‘a city of once over 300,000 inhabitants.’ There was ‘elation’ at the prospect of peace, but ‘terror’ at the scale of destruction; the novelist Ursula Bloom and her husband were speechless with horror; the Dean of Oriel College abandoned any belief in a Just War; J R R Tolkien wrote to his son deploring ‘the utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes; calmly plotting the destruction of the world’, especially while mankind’s ‘moral and intellectual status is declining.’ A London schoolteacher noted the hypocrisy of cheering the ‘Atomic bomb’ yet hating the Germans for their air raids on us; a housewife in Cumbria worried whether Japan had the Bomb, too, and was merely biding its time; a Scots engineer wrote in his diary, ‘There is no hope in man… The end is near – perhaps some years only.’
Out East, the morale of the ‘Forgotten Army’ had been low: they had learned of Victory in Europe, but had been expecting perhaps another ten years of fighting the Japanese to the last ditch. Instead, to their great relief, the conflict was to end in a few days. What, however, did they make of the Bomb?
There are three books that taken together serve as a trilogy describing the war in Burma at first hand and at every level. The first, ‘Defeat Into Victory’ (1956) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Defeat-into-Victory-William-Slim/dp/0330509977 , is by the Fourteenth Army’s commander, Lieutenant General (later Field Marshal and Viscount) William ‘Bill’ Slim. In the final chapter ‘Afterthoughts’ he saw that future armies, facing enemies in possession of battlefield nuclear weapons that could wipe out whole units at a stroke, would have to fight in a dispersed, semi-autonomous fashion in order to complete their campaigns.
The second, John Masters’ ‘The Road Past Mandalay’ (1961) https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-road-past-mandalay/author/masters-john/ , is by one of Slim’s military planners who for a time took command of a Gurkha Brigade dropped behind the Japanese lines, initiating a ferocious battle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masters#Life and ultimately forced to retreat. When he returned to HQ he resumed the heavy burden of intricate planning and towards the conclusion of the Burmese campaign became so exhausted that he was in danger of making fatal errors. Granted leave, he set off to walk the Himalayas with his new wife. Near the end, they came to the Rest House in Joshimath where the resident priest remarked that he was glad the fighting was over. This made no sense until His Holiness showed him a newspaper over two weeks old, with the splash headline ‘ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN.’ The couple had started on their mountain journey, cut off from communication with the outside world, on the morning of 6 August.
‘I believed with instant conviction that there could be no more war. No more tactics, no more strategy, only total destruction – or peace. The training and experience of a lifetime had vanished into the thin Himalayan air, and I was happy.
‘I took my wife in my arms and kissed her. His Holiness said, in Hindi, ‘May God bless you, in peace.’
1992 saw the appearance of ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quartered-Safe-George-MacDonald-Fraser/dp/0007105932 , George MacDonald Fraser’s celebrated vivid account of his part in the Burma Campaign, serving as a private in Cumbria’s Border Regiment. Many years after the war, he argued with a man who was denouncing the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as obscene, monstrous and barbarous. Fraser reflected on what other and how many more lives would have been lost had the war continued; possibly his own, in which case his three children and six grandchildren would never have been born:
‘And that, I’m afraid, is where all discussion of pros and cons evaporates and becomes meaningless, because for those nine lives I would pull the plug on the whole Japanese nation and never even blink. And so, I dare suggest, would you. And if you wouldn’t, you may be nearer to the divine than I am but you sure as hell aren’t fit to be parents or grandparents.’
Here we are now, with these horrors sitting in their silos and launch tubes, plus chemical weapons and vile diseases carefully crafted by laboratory white-coats. Which of the above witnesses are right? Among the military, the tactician, the idealist, the balance-of-terror-ist? For the civilians, the elated, the horrified, the triumphant, the bleak pessimist?
How can we get rid of such dark toys? For surely, we’re not fit to play with them.
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Suggested further reading:

John Pilger on the risks of another nuclear war:
http://johnpilger.com/articles/another-hiroshima-is-coming-unless-we-stop-it-now

Professor Francis Boyle argues that atomic weapons are illegal:
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/04/atomic-bombings-at-75-the-illegality-of-nuclear-weapons/

9 comments:

wiggiatlarge said...

I remember it being said that as an observer Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC was profoundly affected by what he saw when the bomb was dropped, this suited certain narratives in the peace movement for years, but the truth was slightly different.
He retold how his fellow observer was indeed badly affected, but as for himself the observed feelings he showed were the result of a long war and the consequences he saw played out, he had had enough.

Sackerson said...

There's a multifaceted and sometimes a bit ratty debate on The Conservative Woman's version:

https://conservativewoman.co.uk/8-14am-august-16-1945-the-bomb-that-changed-the-world/

Paddington said...

I have been watching a few documentaries on WWII recently. Every single analysis shows much greater loss of life had the bombs not been dropped, both Allied and Japanese.

Then, there is the matter that the fear slowed the Russians down for a while.

Sackerson said...

@P: That point is made a number of times on TCW. Still not sure that made it OK. Nor was Churchill:

' Amid hoists of champagne at a White House stag dinner in January 1953, Churchill startled Truman with a heretofore forbidden question: "Mr President, I hope you have your answer ready for that hour when you and I stand before St Peter and he says, 'I understand you two are responsible for putting off those atomic bombs. What have you got to say for yourselves?'" '
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/were-they-war-criminals-1070883.html

Paddington said...

Compared to the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo?

Churchill was far too willing to lose the lives of soldiers.

Sackerson said...

@P: Yes, point taken, Hitchens has commented publicly numerous times about the questionable morality of our city-bombing campaign. Doesn't invalidate criticism of the new weapon and its use.

Sackerson said...

JD comments:

I didn't read all of the comments at TCW but, as you say, they were a bit 'ratty' at times.

It is worth reading Robert Oppenheimer's thoughts - https://www.wired.co.uk/article/manhattan-project-robert-oppenheimer When he said "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." he was quoting the Bhagavad-Gita and the reference was to part of the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna as explained in the link - Arjuna is torn. But Krishna teaches him about a higher philosophy that will enable him to carry out his duties as a warrior irrespective of his personal concerns...... irrespective of what Arjuna does, everything is in the hands of the divine."Arjuna is a soldier, he has a duty to fight. Krishna not Arjuna will determine who lives and who dies and Arjuna should neither mourn nor rejoice over what fate has in store, but should be sublimely unattached to such results,” says Thompson. “And ultimately the most important thing is he should be devoted to Krishna. His faith will save Arjuna's soul."

W B Yeats understood such detachment, how it is in the hands of the Divine, in his poem "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death

The difference is that Oppenheimer was unable to accept the idea of the immortal soul whereas Yeats knew the soul does not die and is not born, it is immortal.

What do the Japanese say about the two bombs?

Sackerson said...

'Moon of Alabama', reviewing Scott Ritter's 'Scorpion King', a book about the US' increasing nuclear arsenal and the heightened risks of nuclear war
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/08/addicted-to-nuclear-weapons-why-us-policies-never-change-.html:

'... then came the breakup of the Soviet Union. The U.S. felt no longer a need to restrict itself. Its 'unilateral moment' had begun. Since the 1990s it is again trying to gain an absolute nuclear supremacy. It encroached on Russia's borders and it reintroduced anti-ballistic missile capabilities to make a nuclear first strike against Russia possible.

'The attempt failed when Russia in 2018, a decade after warning the U.S. to back off, introduced new weapons which can evade any attempt to counter them. The Obama administrations had failed to draw the right consequences from Russia's warning. Under Trump more nuclear treaties were abolished and soon there will be none left. The world is today more in danger of a nuclear war than it ever was.'

Paddington said...

I said in 1990 that the collapse of the Soviet Union did a terrible thing to the USA's values, since we no longer had a 'bad guy' to point and and compare ourselves to. Middle Eastern terrorists just weren't that big of a threat, even after 9/11.